Currently managed by the Wikimedia Foundation,Wikipedia has come a long way since its formal launch on January 15, 2001. The bid concept behind it was to make the sum of all human knowledge accessible to all. Today, the multilingual encyclopaedia is available in 250 languages worldwide, including Malayalam. Articles available on it - written collaboratively - number roughly ten million. There are 40 languages in which 10,000-plus articles are available. The largest open source encyclopaedia is also the fourth biggest site on the internet with 280 million unique visitors every month.
``A lot of people think that ten million people each add a sentence, and an article is created. It’s much more traditional than that,’’ said Wales, who serves on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, holding the ‘community founder’ seat. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, with a salaried staff of 22 (everyone else, including Wales and the few thousands who take care of editing, is a volunteer), is depending on its `low budget, high efficiency’ mantra to tide over the global economic meltdown, Wales said. Donors today tend to look benevolently at efficient projects, and Wikipedia fits the bill. The Foundation, which is currently involved in a fund-raiser for next year, targets $ 6 million, a small budget for the fourth biggest site. ``We depend on donations from the general public, mostly from the US and Europe, a significant amount from Japan, some from philanthropic foundations. But grassroot support is the core,’’ Wales said. more
